Marilyn Webb

“We were very conscious of race and class, because of Washington being a multi-racial city. Lots of working-class women were there in hospitals and government—just for the taking. We went and talked to them all! And all of these women responded so incredibly! It was like, ‘Yeah! Yeah! Come talk to us!!’ It was a bonanza of organizing."

Marilyn Webb, a long-time journalist, is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Journalism at Knox College and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated book, The Good Death: The New American Search to Reshape the End of Life. She founded the first women's groups in both Chicago and later in Washington D.C. Webb also co-founded off our backs, the first East Coast feminist newspaper, and one of the first women's studies programs at Goddard College. An early organizer, Webb was also notoriously booed off stage by New Left men at a Counter-Inaugural Demonstration against then-President Richard Nixon, becoming a major voice in the emerging independent women's movement.

In her day job, Webb has had a notable career editing and writing for national magazines--Woman's Day, Ladies Home Journal and New York Magazine--and teaching at Columbia University and, later, at Knox College in Illinois, where she ran for mayor and created an award-winning new journalism program. She is now at work on her next book.